Q&A With Bo Wang 

I spent a whole week and one very late night on October 15th, reading and devouring The Chinese Lady, the historical debut novel by Bo Wang! I’m also just as delighted to be interviewing Bo! The Chinese Lady is available now, wherever you get your books! 

Q: Welcome to Book Notions Bo! Would you please give a brief description of your debut novel, The Chinese Lady?

A: This novel imagines the life of the first Chinese woman to arrive in the United States, in 1834. She was first brought to New York as part of an exhibition of Chinese goods, then later exhibited by the showman P.T. Barnum. While she was briefly a nationwide sensation, who she really was, and her life before and after her time in the public eye, has been lost to history.

Q: While The Chinese Lady is historical fiction, it is based on the real history of two American merchants bringing a young Chinese girl to New York in 1834 as a live exhibit to promote the sale of Chinese imports. How did you come across this story and what made you want to write this story despite the information being almost nonexistent? 

A: I stumbled across her story while I was working on a project at GBH to expand the perspectives taught in U.S. history classrooms. The historian Nancy Davis had just written a nonfiction book about both the Chinese Lady and the China-American trade. I was fascinated by the gaps in the historical record. In particular, the fact that she had bound feet was one of her chief sources of fascination to the American public, but it was also the biggest mystery for me, since typically only women from well-off families could afford to have bound feet. I was also enrolled in a Grubstreet writing class at the time, which required me to turn in ten pages every week, so I just started filling in the gaps with my imagination.

Q: How long did it take you to research and write The Chinese Lady? Without spoiling too much, what is fact vs fiction? 

A: It took me about four years. Most of the story is fiction, because there is so little documented about the Chinese Lady’s life beyond her time on exhibit, and nothing at all documented from her point-of-view. Where I leaned heavily on fact is in the historical details of setting, as well as in United States media coverage of the Chinese Lady and other Chinese at the time. Most of the newspaper and magazine excerpts in the novel are real.

Q: What I personally took away from the novel, The Chinese Lady, was the hardship of women fighting to have a choice in the time they were living in since that was what Little Sparrow/Afong was fighting for. The novel also called out Margaret and the women in the mission for only doing good to be seen, feel good and to be rewarded rather than doing good because it was right. Was this the intent you had on writing the book and hoping readers take away from it?

A: Besides wanting to mirror a little bit of the Chinese Lady’s actual experience of having her story told for her, I chose to write the first three sections of the book from other women’s perspective because I wanted to highlight that exact commonality between all the women; they all wanted to have more agency, significance, and choice. As for Margaret and the Mission women—as well as the Chinese Lady herself—I wanted readers to come away thinking about the many possible motivations they might have had for doing good. They might have wanted both to be seen and to make an impact with the privilege they had.

Q: Bo, can you reveal the plot details for book 2, & are you currently thinking about book 3? 

A: So far, book 2 is a historical fiction with noir vibes set in the 1920s. I don’t know if it’s book 3, but I also started a contemporary novel project set between Shanghai and the United States.

Q: How do you feel knowing The Chinese Lady is being compared to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club & Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle Of Women? I love Lady Tan’s Circle Of Women & Lisa’s recent release Daughters Of The Sun And Moon & have been fortunate to interview Lisa several times! 

A: It’s an honor. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is such a cultural bastion, as well as an important book to my childhood. I read Lisa See for the first time after publishing The Chinese Lady, and then I couldn’t stop, she is so good! I first read China Dolls, then Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, and am now on The Island of Sea Women.

Q: If The Chinese Lady were to be made into a movie or series, who would your dream cast be for the characters you created? 

A: Oh, that’s a hard question! I think the only dream cast member would be for Michelle Yeoh to play Mrs. Moy.

Q: Bo, would you please provide your social media links so the readers of the blog and I may follow you and your work?

A: Thank you! I’m on Instagram as @bookishbowang